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Humans excel at visual social inference, the ability to infer hidden elements of a scene from subtle behavioral cues such as other people's gaze, pose, and orientation. This ability drives everyday social reasoning in humans and is critical…

In this paper we show a new technique to analyze families of rankings. In particular we focus on sports rankings and, more precisely, on soccer leagues. We consider that two teams compete when they change their relative positions in…

In this paper, we present a novel approach for optimising long-term tactical and strategic decision-making in football (soccer) by encapsulating events in a league environment across a given time frame. We model the teams' objectives for a…

Composing a team of professional players is among the most crucial decisions in association football. Nevertheless, transfer market decisions are often based on myopic objectives and are questionable from a financial point of view. This…

The transfer fees of sports players have become astronomical. This is because bringing players of great future value to the club is essential for their survival. We present a case study on the key factors affecting the world's top soccer…

We showcase in this paper the use of some tools from network theory to describe the strategy of football teams. Using passing data made available by FIFA during the 2010 World Cup, we construct for each team a weighted and directed network…

Transfers in professional football (soccer) are risky investments because of the large transfer fees and high risks involved. Although data-driven models can be used to improve transfer decisions, existing models focus on describing…

This paper introduces an innovative application of Large Event Models (LEMs), akin to Large Language Models, to the domain of soccer analytics. By learning the language of soccer - predicting variables for subsequent events rather than…

Characterizing playing style is important for football clubs on scouting, monitoring and match preparation. Previous studies considered a player's style as a combination of technical performances, failing to consider the spatial…

With the vast amount of data collected on football and the growth of computing abilities, many games involving decision choices can be optimized. The underlying rule is the maximization of an expected utility of outcomes and the law of…

We propose a foundation model for soccer, which is able to predict subsequent actions in a soccer match from a given input sequence of actions. As a proof of concept, we train a transformer architecture on three seasons of data from a…

In many sports, it is commonly believed that the home team has an advantage over the visiting team, known as the home field advantage. Yet its causal effect on team performance is largely unknown. In this paper, we propose a novel causal…

This paper introduces an approach to predicting the next event in a soccer match, a challenge bearing remarkable similarities to the problem faced by Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike other methods that severely limit event dynamics in…

Defensive organization is critical in soccer, particularly during negative transitions when teams are most vulnerable. The back-four defensive line plays a decisive role in preventing goal-scoring opportunities, yet its collective…

In this work, we draw attention to a connection between skill-based models of game outcomes and Gaussian process classification models. The Gaussian process perspective enables a) a principled way of dealing with uncertainty and b) rich…

Accurate player and ball detection has become increasingly important in recent years for sport analytics. As most state-of-the-art methods rely on training deep learning networks in a supervised fashion, they require huge amounts of…

This article describes an application of three well-known statistical methods in the field of game-tree search: using a large number of classified Othello positions, feature weights for evaluation functions with a game-phase-independent…

Computer Vision developments are enabling significant advances in many fields, including sports. Many applications built on top of Computer Vision technologies, such as tracking data, are nowadays essential for every top-level analyst,…

As a globally celebrated sport, soccer has attracted widespread interest from fans all over the world. This paper aims to develop a comprehensive multi-modal framework for soccer video understanding. Specifically, we make the following…

We consider the task of determining the number of chances a soccer team creates, along with the composite nature of each chance-the players involved and the locations on the pitch of the assist and the chance. We propose an interpretable…